My nights are largely dictated right now by trying to finish doing the grinds associated with the Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. Right now my evenings look a little something like this. I get home and I log into Final Fantasy XIV to queue for Main Story roulette on the Samurai. I either manage to get the long one that amounts for almost a full bars worth of experience, or I get the short one and am out of their quickly. Regardless I am super casually leveling the Samurai who hit 76 last night, without any real need for gearing.
After that I log into Destiny 2 and start chipping away on some objective. There is no way in hell I will be able to complete multiple sets of this armor on multiple characters. However I should be able to wrap up the rest of the requirements before August 27th when the event officially stops. I am off tomorrow and while I have no clue what we are going to do during the day, I should at least get more play time than usual. Then the weekend should also be a significant time for knocking things out as well. My hope is by the end of Sunday to have finished the conversion of the set from Blue to Purple and begin on Masterwork achievements.
The other morning I posted the entire list of things that needed to be completed to get the gear, and this morning I thought I would give an update.
Titan Helm
2/10 Gambit Matches
1500/1500 Orbs generated
30/75 Guardians defeated with Arc Weapons
Titan Gauntlets
10/10 Heroic Public Events
5/5 Challenges
43/100 EAZ Minibosses
Titan Chestpiece
300/300 Matched Orbs generated in Strike Playlist
50/50 EAZ Chests Looted
300/300 Fallen Defeated
Titan Greaves
48/50 Bounties
500/500 Void Orbs generated in Strike Playlist
31/200 Solar Melee Final Blows
Titan Mark
15/25 Patrols on Io
300/300 EAZ Elemental Orbs generated
300/300 Solar Weapon Final Blows
As you can see in the above lists there is an awful lot of stuff struck through and completed. Last night was largely about getting a two for one. Yesterday was Void singe day and I had two Strike Playlist related orb generation bits that could in theory be knocked out at the same time. Firstly I had to generate 500 void orbs and secondly I had to generate 300 orbs matching the daily singe and my subclass. Seeing as it was void day for everyone… most of the folks in the strikes were generating void orbs and after about 4 I managed to knock out both components.
Without a doubt the worst thing awaiting me is getting the last 57 mini-bosses in the European Aerial Zone. That was just a poorly designed component of this grind, because you only get credit for the bosses that you actually manage to land a hit on. Since there are multiple bosses up at the same time, you are going to inevitably miss about half of the kills pending you are not running around purposefully with a group that you also have on voice. The other challenge for me personally is I struggle hard at finding the mini bosses when they are inside the buildings, since those buildings have an awful lot of blind corners that just end up slowing you down.
The rest of the steps are going to just be me sitting there and dedicating time to doing various activities. For example as bad as I am at Crucible, it is just going to take a sheer block of time to finish getting the 45 Guardian kills to finish that achievement out. In theory I might go ahead and knock out the Gambit matches because there is a likelihood that I might get a handful of invader kills that will count towards the total doing that. Bounties will take care of themselves, and Io patrols is just a block of time spent grinding on a single planet.
Solar Melee kills sounds particularly rough, but I plan on stacking that while I am doing patrols on Io because one of the things that I learned during Destiny 1 is that if you punch someone with the hilt of your sword it counts as a sword kill. Similarly if you punch someone with your elemental sword when it is completely out of ammunition… it counts as an elemental melee kill. So I expect to be punching a lot of Vex and Taken on Io while completing patrols, which is a better option that ruining someones ignition in the forge. Apparently the orbs that you are supposed to dunk also count as solar melee.
There is a way to cheese the EAZ boss kills step, but it would require me gathering up a full team, lucking out on getting the cabal invasion event, and not killing a specific boss forcing a mini boss to keep re-spawning. Since in truth I want to gather up a bunch more packages I am planning on doing it the old fashioned painful way, since seemingly on PC side at least we are not having the mass abandonment issues that the console players are with rotating into matches that players have bailed out of after the mini-boss phase and before the final boss kill.
I still think I should be able to finish things up this weekend.
My friends Saskura and Solaria in a Final Fantasy XIV dungeon
One of the things that I take fairly seriously is screenshots. I find them to be terribly useful ways to break up large blocks of text, and as such I try to generally place one at least every other paragraph. The challenge with this means that I need an awful lot of them to make it work. Since I write my posts first thing in the morning and on a fairly limited time schedule, it also means that I need them to be somewhat organized so that I can get the right one at the right time. As such this morning I thought I would talk a little bit about my routine, and how I go about managing images.
The Tools
I largely find myself relying upon two different tools to capture all of the images that you see. The reason why I have multiple is because occasionally certain games do not like being captured by certain tools. The unfortunate bit about duplicating your effort is that there will occasionally be situations where an image has been captured in multiple locations… and when you are recording 4k images like I am this leads to a bit of clean up and reconciliation after the fact.
The first tool in my toolkit is DxTory by ExKode which is a little piece of software that does exactly one thing… record screenshots and images of Direct X windows. For years I used Fraps, but more recently Windows 10 started causing issues with it forcing me to fall back on another product. Most of these tools are payware and not share/freeware but in the case of DxTory it is a reasonable one time purchase of 3800 yen or roughly $35 at the current exchange rate. For this you get a key that will then allow you to effectively register copies effectively forever. The things that I like the most about DxTory is how generally lightweight it is and how good the output looks. As such I generally use this as my primary tool for capturing video and even use it to capture consoles since I play those through my Elgato Pro card.
GeForce Experience In-Game Overlay
My backup is configuring GeForce Experience which offers the ability to capture images at a hardware level… as such bypassing lockouts like the one Destiny 2 tried to put into place. Since it is pulling your data at a driver level, in theory there should never be a game that can somehow block this from recording. The negative about all of this is that it is a little flaky and if I leave my system up and running without a reboot for too long it just stops responding at all. It has a neat feature where it dumps games into a directory named after whatever game you happen to be playing. The gotcha there is this only works if you are playing it in full screen, and otherwise it just dumps everything into a directory called “Desktop” with a bajillion images that are all named Desktop with a timestamp tacked onto the end.
The Storage Scheme
My Working “Gameshots” Directory
The problem with screenshots is that they get stranded all over your harddrive if you allow the default tool for each game to capture them. Initially my goal was simply to collect them in a single location and I personally chose “Gameshots” as a directory name on my bulk mechanical storage drive. I went through the process of pointing everything to this one directory, but occasionally would encounter a game that would not allow me to configure where the screenshots were saved. It is around this point that I started a new strategy of relying entirely upon a third party image capture software and disabling the default screenshot functionality within each game.
Effectively I have two directories that matter in this scenario:
Working Gameshots Directory – these are fresh images that I am capturing on a nightly basis and are generally going to be what I am most likely to be writing about. The above screenshot shows various folders based on games as configured by GeForce Experience. I have DxTory writing to a folder in this structure called Captures as raw screenshots need a little bit of processing that I will get into later.
Deep Storage – Since I accumulate a lot of these images, every so often I reach a point where the windows file system becomes unwieldy when I am hunting for a specific image. As such every few months I spend an evening filing away the raw images into game based directories on my network attached storage system.
The core problem I have with my deep storage is… how exactly does one organize several hundred games worth of screenshots? I have a rough system that you can see above, but it also at times is just nonsense. Diablo 3 for example… for whatever reason when I first slotted it into the system I labelled an “Online” game and not an “MMORPG”, and I have never bothered to go back and move it. Apparently in my head there was a distinction between something that was a WoW-like and something that just happened to have online play. You also see an “FPS” directory and a “Shooter” directory and the distinction there is I am apparently using the term Shooter to describe Bullet Hell style space combat shooters.
“Miscshots” becomes any debris that happens to also collect in my gameshots directory such as clips of things that are not games when I happen to capture screenshots from a movie. “Stream” is a catch all directory for me backing up anything associated with my stream like overlays or titlecards. Then you have the ultimate lazy directory which is “ToBeSorted” which has anything that is not easily identifiable in a thumbnail or weird one-offs that I will resolve at some later date… the only problem is that later date has never actually arrived. The other directory is “nonshots” which is anything that happens to get saved to the directory that is not an image.
The only negative about this set up so far is the fact that I am playing an awful lot of the games at 4k resolutions, which becomes extremely cumbersome to deal with. There is no way that I want to upload a 4k screenshot to my blog even though Jetpack image hosting does some chicanery and renders it in a semi-optimized format. This meant that I needed something to easily batch convert large numbers of files down to something more reasonable like 1080p, and for this I lean on a software I have used since the 90s.
IrfanView is a swiss army knife when it comes to image maintenance. First off it is one of the fastest image viewers if you simply want to page through a directory full of images looking for the one you are actually trying to find. Next up it offers a whole slew of image conversion options allowing you to shift things between formats and does a solid job of relatively lossless resizing. I have mine configured to set everything to 1080p and save the output as a jpg to drop the size down a bit more before uploading it. If you are so inclined you can even use it to OCR documents with a pretty high accuracy rate. It is completely free to use, but registering your copy is only 10 euros.
This is Madness
Before you comment… I realize this is complete madness. It however is what works for me personally. I am not suggesting anyone adopt my scheme for dealing with screenshots, but I am suggesting that you ultimately develop your own. I went down this rabbit hole because in the early days of my blog I would simply do a google image search and call it “good enough”. The problem there is you wind up with results of varying quality and all manner of sizes. I began to obsess about making sure that I had plenty of screenshots so that I would never have to do this last minute hunt ever again.
The oldest image that I had sitting in my Guild Wars 2 directory
The end result works for me, and helps ease my mind… that if I absolutely need to find a screenshot from the opening of Guild Wars 2 I know I can with a moments notice. The other nice side effect is that keeping my screenshots organized also gives me a way of seeing exactly what games I happened to be playing during a given block of time. This has given me fodder for another side project of mine which is keeping track of what games I played during which months in a given year. That admittedly is also madness, but whatever… it makes me happy.
This week is in theory “Topic Brainstorming Week”, and at least some part of this is being aware of when you are being gifted a topic. If you simply pay attention to your surroundings, there are topics everywhere. There was a time in this blogs history where I mined topics heavily from game forums and twitter. While reading either there would come moments when I would feel more passionate about a topic than was really possible to put in a post or a tweet. These moments were screaming for me to sit down and write a blog post. The biggest challenge of course is keeping track of those ideas because they often hit at moments when you are not able to sit down at a keyboard and start hacking away at those thoughts.
Yesterday I had one of those moments hit while I was wrapping up for the day. Thankfully I dusted off my grossly outdated Trello and cobbled together enough notes to get me through writing something this morning. Trello is an exceptional tool and Beyond Tannhauser Gate featured an excellent rundown of some of its features yesterday. We personally use it every week to keep track of our Show Notes for AggroChat in part because it allows us to bump topics easily by simply moving the card to the next show. Yesterday I made a few notes in the Aggronaut board along with the links in order to feed into this mornings post.
Yesterday a series of tweets came through that both had very similar themes. In theory if I had to guess Bazgrim saw the first tweet and then created a variant that was less game specific. Regardless they both cover the same ground, which is ways that MMORPG games and the types of interaction had a positive effect on their lives. I took long enough to retweet with a few comments from the first, but I also felt like I had a lot more to say on the subject. As such I jotted something down quickly into Trello and here we are this morning talking about it. For reference the original tweet was from Warcraft Memes and can be found here. Now I am going to hit on some of the points as they relate to me.
Helped with your depression or mental illness / Coping with Loneliness
While I have never been diagnosed, I have struggled my entire life. My mom dealt with periods of depression and suicidal thoughts, and I have struggled with these same dark thoughts at many times during my life. MMORPGs at least in part give me a different world to join and help me to get unstuck in my own thoughts. I can focus on those “wizard chores” as my friend Grace calls them, and forget for at least a moment that I feel like i am completely unraveling as a human being.
There are times when I just can’t simply cope with human interaction, and as such I probably don’t really use MMORPGs to cope with loneliness in the same manner as most people would. However there are times when I am deep in one of my “turtle mode” phases, where simply being reminded that there are other human beings out there as they scurry around me in a major city hub helps. MMORPGs allow me to be alone without really being alone, and they also give me an impetus to reach out to other human beings at times because there are many tasks that cannot be completed without doing so.
Been a place you found lasting friendships / Finding real friends
My first real MMORPG was Everquest and I started playing that in 2001. Over the eighteen years between I have flitted from game to game, and during that process picked up a number of friends in each of them that I still have regular contact with to this day. The whole “Bel’s Party Van” thing came about because of my habit of gathering up people in my wake and trying to drag them along with me to the next thing on the horizon. The truth is I have met an awful lot of my really close friends through blogging as well. For sake of this topic I am just going to run through the list of people that I record the AggroChat podcast with on a weekly basis.
Ammo – We both played World of Warcraft on the same server and met at some point along the way through that. Additionally since that point we have played dozens of other games together and she has been responsible for 99.9% of the Artwork you see on this blog.
Ashgar – We met through another AggroChat member during Cataclysm, when a bunch of people that I had played with in Vanilla came back to Argent Dawn and I gathered them up in my guild. Has become one of my closest friends and we have hung out in person several times at Pax South.
Grace – We met initially through blogging, but I absolutely drafted her into joining the Final Fantasy XIV guild in 2013. Since then we have realized that we suffer from a lot of the same issues, and it is super important to have people in your life who understand that sometimes you cannot handle human interaction, but also want to be able to do stuff.
Kodra – We raided together in Vanilla World of Warcraft, and have been in a lot of different guilds together over the years. We weren’t super close back then but through years of constant interaction have forged a friendship based on shared experience and amicably disagreeing on various topics.
Tamrielo – Was one of the leaders of our Vanilla Raid and also someone that I talked to on a fairly regular basis. In the years between gaming together in WoW, I got adopted into what was then an AOL Instant Messenger chat group and ultimate was the prototype for what would eventually become AggroChat. There are times when it feels like Tam and I are the same person put through vastly different experiences.
Thalen – My dwarven brother. Thalen raided with a different group in World of Warcraft, but this comes from an era when all of the raid groups were friendly with each other. He regularly attended our alt night events, and through many years of that we developed a friendship. He also has been drug along on many of my adventures and I am thankful that he too is someone I have gotten to hang out with in person.
Basically I have a long line of people that I have interacted with and then adopted, and most of these come from MMORPGs. I grew up in a very small town and never quite felt like I really belonged to any sort of engagement that was available to me. However through the internet and especially through online gaming I have found my people in droves. Understanding just how special this is has also lead me to my “collector” behavior where I try and gather folks up and drag them along with me. There are a lot of you that are probably reading this that have been adopted, and probably more that will be adopted at some point in the future. It is a thing I do.
Improved your communication skills and teamwork / leadership
I suppose I have always come across as way more of a reasonable adult than I actually am at any given point. This is in part why I found myself straight out of college in my very first job being thrust into a supervisory role. I was the lead web developer for a fortune 500 company, and was given a team of three people to work under me. Life was fine and dandy up until the point my Boss decided that I needed to punish one of my employees for taking too long of lunch breaks. I was forced to write them up for something I didn’t believe in… and it chafed super hard. From that point forward I purposefully avoided allowing myself to be pushed into a leadership role in the workplace.
When World of Warcraft was shaping up to be the next big thing, I knew I wanted a really good place to hang my hat. I also knew that I had come from a fairly unfortunate situation in Everquest, where the guild leader and his wife more or less dictated what was being done on a nightly basis. The only way that I was certain not to fall into this situation was to start a guild and lead it myself. I gathered up as many friends as I had at the time from a long line of games and sorta pointed them in a single direction. That lead to the founding of House Stalwart a guild that is still alive and kicking in spite of me no longer leading it.
Each time I joined a raid I got thrust into positions of responsibility. I had a former raid leader impart upon me the wisdom that when someone is willing to step up and talk through problems in a raid, that ultimately they are going to be viewed as one of the leaders. So after having two raids blow up on me, I had a friend come to me asking me to take a chance on him. Myself, Dageransus, Elnore and Thalen all founded the Duranub Raiding Company and it thrived up until the point that World of Warcraft placed their hand on the scale creating perks for Raiding Guilds and pretty much dooming the non-Guild alliance.
In all of these situations I was forced to negotiate with other players in order to get the result we needed. This meant dealing with all manner of interpersonal disputes and even breaking out bargaining tactics to make sure that the raid was able to function every single week with 25 capable and smiling faces. We poured over statistics trying to figure out how we could cultivate talent, and minimize the impact of the folks that weren’t really pulling their weight. All of these things happened without having any real power over any of the individuals we were trying to influence. There was nothing at all keeping a player from simply logging out of the game and walking away permanently.
I am not exactly sure when it clicked that I was essentially doing the thing which I had avoided like the plague for most of my career. I was leading people and even having to deal with punishments and reconciliation. A transition started to happen, where I kept being pushed into taking on more responsibility at work, and with it I kept backpedaling away from responsibility in game. These days I am the manager over three different groups of development resources totally sixteen different individuals that I am responsible for. I also regularly get called in to serve on various projects which come with their own management responsibilities.
None of these are things I would have ever felt comfortable doing, had I not years of experience doing the same basic thing in MMORPGs. The problem is… I can’t list 18 years of guild leadership on a resume without getting a bunch of funny looks. The boomer generation isn’t aware of it being equivalent experience. When my friends are going to places like Amazon, Google or Microsoft… they are awake to the realization that leading people is leading people. There will come a time when those hours spent convincing the Mage to give it one more try, will absolutely be resume worthy.
The weird thing is… I have an underground of MMORPG gamers at work. There are a bunch of us that talk about these experiences, and I seemingly have a way of being able to tell when someone plays. When you have been called to lead a group of strangers, it is amazing how much easier it is to lead people you actually know. I have a vested interest in watching these mmo gamers coming up through the ranks, and serving as that mentor that gets what they are choosing to do in their free time. We just lost one recently that was a Mythic raider, and I hope to keep tabs on their career and maybe recruit them back at some point in the future.
The very long story short… MMORPGs made a positive impact upon my life and gave me the confidence to go on and do bigger things in my own career. I feel like they are more of a positive influence on most of the individuals that I know as opposed to being a hindrance. There are so many life skills that get taught one skill point at a time when having to navigate your way through a bunch of other human beings. Once you make your own click moment and understand that what you are doing is the same thing as leadership in any other form, it will start to effect the decisions you make when the game is logged out as well.
This weekend was largely one lost to Destiny 2, as I am apparently back on that nonsense again. The curious thing is that I had not really been playing for quite some time. I more or less missed the vast majority the last two seasons. So while Bungie was breaking up with Activision and kicking into seemingly overdrive in releasing content… I have been more or less slumbering obliviously to whatever was going on. This means that I am in probably my favorite spot as far as MMORPGs go… returning to a bounty of new systems to play with.
The real reason I have returned however is because of the 2019 Solstice of Heroes event. This time around the hook is the fact that if you manage to earn a purple set of gear, you will be able to turn it in for the Armor 2.0 equivalent as soon as Shadowkeep launches. I love when a game gives me the ability to work towards a future goal and also gives me something to do in the short term. The process starts with our friend Eva Levante introducing us to the new European Aerial Zone content… and quickly unlocking a full set of Green quality level 700 armor.
As players we have to complete a bunch of activities to turn this Green set into the blue 720 set that you can see my character wearing above. For the Titan the items that I had to knock out are as follows:
Complete One European Aerial Zone run
50 Precision Kills Anywhere
50 Hive Anywhere
5 Solstice Bounties
Loot 10 Chests in European Aerial Zone
Defeat 75 Enemies in European Aerial Zone
Complete 3 Adventures
Collect 100 Solar Orbs in Strikes
Defeat 10 Guardians in Crucible or Gambit
Complete 10 Public Events on Nessus
Collect 100 Void Orbs in Crucible or Gambit
Open 10 Solstice Packages
Complete 10 Strikes
Collect 500 Elemental Orbs of Any Time Anywhere
Complete 10 Crucible or Gambit Matches
I spent an excessive amount of time grinding this weekend working towards the objective of turning my green set into a blue set. By Saturday morning I had managed to convert the greens into blues and was starting on the second grind. This one is a little more heinous, and in truth there has been quite a bit of complaining among the community regarding how seemingly unrealistic it is to complete three sets of this armor. I am only focused on the Titan and I am expecting it is going to take me several weeks to actually knock out all of the objectives.
Similar to the list above, here is the specific list of activities I need to tick off in order to convert the blue set into a purple one:
Complete 10 Gambit Matches
Collect 1500 Elemental Orbs with a subclass equipped matching the daily singe
Defeat 75 Guardians in Crucible or Gambit using Arc Weapons
Complete 10 Heroic Public Events
Complete 5 Daily or Weekly Challenges
Defeat 100 Minibosses in EAZ
Defeat 300 Enemies in Strikes with a Subclass Equipped Matching the daily singe
Defeat 300 Fallen Anywhere with a subclass equipped matching the daily singe
Loot 50 EAZ Chests
Complete 50 Bounties
Collect 500 Void Orbs in Strikes
Kill Enemies anywhere with Solar Melee Attacks
Complete 25 Patrols on IO
Collect 300 Elemental Orbs of Any kind in EAZ
Defeat 300 Enemies with Solar Weapons
Another thing that I have been working on is unlocking various items in Callus’ treasure room that he crafted for us. I unlocked access to it on Saturday and I dumped a ton of my glimmer into buying the various trophies. In theory I should have waited for the glimmer discount to have increased after several weeks of doing the content… but I am always looking for something to spend down my glimmer on so I didn’t really mind it. I’ve spent a good chunk of Destiny 2 being glimmer capped, because I am seemingly bad at managing that.
I had an awful lot of luck this weekend with drops. I managed to pick up Lord of Wolves and got it by completing a bounty in the Forsaken Shore. I have no clue how you are supposed to get this thing, but I somehow feel like maybe that was not actually the intended way? I always figured you had to kill the escapees from the Prison of Elders, another thing I have been bad about actually keeping up with. Lord of Wolves was one of my favorite weapons from Destiny 1, and I am super happy to have it back in Destiny 2. This has replaced the Ikelos shotgun in my standard Gambit and Black Armory Forge loadout.
Another thing that I picked up this weekend is what I would probably consider to be my ideal load-out for the Bygones Gambit pulse rifle. The first two pips are “fine” but not perfect with Fluted Barrel and Armor Piercing Rounds. The last two however are dialed in to exactly what I would want with Rampage and Outlaw, because on a Pulse Rifle I am going to do my damnedest to make sure I am dialed in on a precision hitbox before firing… giving me super fast reload. I also really just like the look of the skin I have for the weapon.
I have no clue why Destiny 2 has latched on so hard, but I guess it makes sense given that I tend to cycle through periods where I am obsessed with it. I’ve been really happy to see some of the changes Bungie has made or at least announced since taking over the reins from Activision. I am also looking forward to the shift over to Steam away from Battle.net, largely because I think it will make it easier to connect up with people. More than anything I am looking forward to cross save which is supposedly coming in now ahead of Shadowkeep.
I am still trying to poke my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a nightly basis, but for now I am just letting the obsession play out. I have a feeling that once I knock out the purple set of armor I will dial things back significantly seeing as I doubt I will actually be able to masterwork any of the pieces. Destiny 2 is in a really solid place right now and I am happy to be returning to it.
